Keorapetse Kgositsile

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Lore & Background

Jazz was crucial to Kgositsile's sense of black American culture and his own place in it. He saw John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, B. B. King, and many others in the jazz clubs of New York, and wrote to them and of them in his poems. He wrote of the black aesthetic he pursued and celebrated: 'There is nothing like art—in the oppressor's sense of art. There is only movement. Force. Creative power. The walk of Sophiatown tsotsi or my Harlem brother on Lenox Avenue. Field Hollers. The Blues. A Trane riff. Marvin Gaye or mbaqanga. Anguished happiness. Creative power, in whatever form it is released, moves like the dancer's muscles.' In 1975, Kgositsile decided to return to Africa, despite his blossoming career in the United States, and took up a teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. In 1978, he married another ANC exile, Baleka Mbete, who was also living in Tanzania. Still from exile, he renewed his activities with the ANC, founding its Department of Education in 1977 and its Department of Arts and Culture in 1983; he became Deputy Secretary in 1987. Throughout this period he was banned in South Africa, but in 1990 the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) decided to attempt a publication within the country. The successful result was When the Clouds Clear, a collection of poems from other volumes, which was Kgositsile's first book to be available in his native country. In July 1990, after 29 years in exile, Kgositsile returned to South Africa. He arrived in a country wholly different from the one he had left, transformed by the beginning of the end of apartheid and the release and later the political triumph of Nelson Mandela. His son is American rapper Earl Sweatshirt.

Reader's Guide

Keorapetse Kgositsile's significance lies in his role as a bridge between African and African-American poetry during a period of political upheaval and cultural renaissance. Living in exile in the United States from 1962 to 1975, he became a central figure among African-American poets, encouraging interest in Africa and the practice of poetry as performance art, notably in New York jazz clubs. His work combined lyricism with an unmuted call to arms, as in these lines from 'Dawn': 'Remember in baton boot and bullet ritual / The bloodhounds of Monster Vorster wrote / SOWETO over the belly of my land / with the indelible blood of infants / So the young are no longer young / Not that they demand a hasty death.' He argued persistently against the idea of Négritude, a purely aesthetic conception of black culture, on the grounds that it was dependent on white aesthetic models of perception, a process he called 'fornicating with the white eye.' He also founded the Black Arts Theatre in Harlem, seeing black theater as a fundamentally revolutionary activity whose ambition must be the destruction of ingrained habits of thought. After returning to South Africa in 1990, he served as vice president of COSAW, fostering the careers of young writers while continuing his steady critique of South African politics. He was inaugurated as National Poet Laureate in 2006.

Did You Know?

• Kgositsile's first experience of apartheid included a conflict with a local white family after he fought a white friend who hesitated when other friends refused to join a boxing club that denied Kgositsile membership.
• He was urged by the African National Congress to leave South Africa in 1961, initially going to Dar es Salaam to write for Spearhead magazine.
• The Last Poets, a group of revolutionary African-American poets, took their name from one of his poems.
• His first book available in South Africa was When the Clouds Clear, published in 1990 by the Congress of South African Writers.
• Upon returning to South Africa in 1990 after 29 years in exile, he wrote: 'Here are my colleagues and hosts. Can you deal with that? Hosts! In my own country.'